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Discovering Field’s Diagnostic Listening Instruction

Photo by garageolimpo
Photo by garageolimpo

When I was first given a class on teaching listening, I scoured the bookstores for a textbook.  It was at that point I realized just how little respect listening instruction receives in publication.  There are a handful of books that cover a mix of speaking and listening, including a well-respected book by Paul Nation, Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. Most of these books short change listening, though Nation treats it better than most.  A class dedicated to the practice of teaching listening shouldn’t have to share a text with speaking instruction.  A focused class deserves a focused text.

I finally found John Field’s book, Listening in the Language Classroom.  Field’s book is an amazing take on listening instruction.  He promotes using a “diagnostic approach” to listening instruction, which he contrasts with what he refers to as a “comprehension approach.”  This changed the way that I approached language instruction and the preparation of teachers who will have to do the same. I was one of the many who treated listening as a kind of solitary unit that learners either got or didn’t get. I never thought thought about WHY they had difficulties understanding past the obvious (and overly emphasized) issues of speed and vocabulary.

I was excited to use this with my students at the time and did so in that first semester.  It was one of the biggest disasters of my teaching career.  I rightfully had high expectations for the students in the class (all English Education majors), but I so completely misjudged the difficulty of the text.  It was a rookie mistake and both the students and I suffered for it.  I ended up sidelining the book and created outlines and presentations for the students to read/listen to instead (those outlines can be found on this Posterous site until the service closes down on April 30, 2013).  While that experience soured me on using Field’s book with my students, it did nothing to dissuade me from using his ideas with future classes.

I now try to integrate Field’s concepts and approach to instruction with a much easier, accessible text for learners in my classes (Practical English Language Teaching: Listening).  This series of books is written to be as accessible as possible to novice learners in the field of TESOL.  The “Listening” book is no exception.  In the past, I’ve spread the book out over the duration of a semester while sprinkling in concepts from the Field book to add depth.

This semester I’m trying something new.  The first 4 chapters will be done primarily as self-study, while I put more of a focus on Field’s concepts and the application of those concepts with different groups of learners (in parallel with chapters 2-4 in the PELT: Listening text).  The second half of the semester students will primarily be developing lessons for two listening courses taught at the university, with a focus on diagnosing student problems and implementing instructional interventions that address these weaknesses.  I’m quite excited about this partnership and a little nervous as well.

I’ll be following up here on this project throughout the semester, discussing the challenges and, hopefully, successes throughout.

 

I’d love to hear any thoughts that you have.  What experiences have you had with teaching listening or with teaching teachers how to to teach listening (that’s a mouthful)?  Anything I should look out for? Anything I should try?  Any great lessons that go beyond simple comprehension?

Facebook hits exam results by 20%…In other news, if you study 88% less, you’ll do 20% worse on the test.

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via telegraph.co.uk

Talk about headline grabbing. Ugh! The real findings are that people who use Facebook “study” (not sure how they operationalized that) 88% less than those who don’t use the site (how did they find any??).

Here’s a link to the abstract. I guess I’ll have to wait a little while until I can see what they did. The abstract looks vague, which isn’t a good sign. Lest you think I doubt this finding, however. I don’t. I’m just glad I didn’t have Facebook when I was young. The immense time-suck it is would have swallowed me whole. I have problems with it as an adult.

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Facebook® and academic performance

Paul A. Kirschner and Aryn C. Karpinski

Abstract

There is much talk of a change in modern youth – often referred to as digital natives or Homo Zappiens – with respect to their ability to simultaneously process multiple channels of information. In other words, kids today can multitask. Unfortunately for proponents of this position, there is much empirical documentation concerning the negative effects of attempting to simultaneously process different streams of information showing that such behavior leads to both increased study time to achieve learning parity and an increase in mistakes while processing information than those who are sequentially or serially processing that same information. This article presents the preliminary results of a descriptive and exploratory survey study involving Facebook use, often carried out simultaneously with other study activities, and its relation to academic performance as measured by self-reported Grade Point Average (GPA) and hours spent studying per week. Results show that Facebook® users reported having lower GPAs and spend fewer hours per week studying than nonusers.

Exams come to the bedroom with new invigilation software – cool idea, but hardware is a non-starter for most programs

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via guardian.co.uk

This sounds like a cool system. However, it also sounds really expensive and requires participant set up on home computers. How many problems did you pick out in that last sentence?

I really don’t think that this is doable for widespread adoption, but it could work for some situations. Purely distance programs could probably make this work. The package could just be a requirement of the program. If it were utilized by most of the courses, it could be a valuable asset.

This could be good for testing centers. ETS could require these to be set up in local testing centers, particularly in those areas in which they have had problems in the past. Essentially, trying to keep the centers honest as well as the test-takers.

No Grading, More Learning – I’m totally going to do this. Will it work in Korea?

No Grading, More Learning

May 3, 2010

When Duke University’s Cathy Davidson announced her grading plan for a seminar she would be offering this semester, she attracted attention nationwide. Some professors cheered, others tut-tutted, and others asked “Can she do that?”

Her plan? Turn over grading to the students in the course, and get out of the grading business herself.

Now that the course is finished, Davidson is giving an A+ to the concept. “It was spectacular, far exceeding my expectations,” she said. “It would take a lot to get me back to a conventional form of grading ever again.”

Davidson is becoming a scholar of grading. She’s been observing grading systems at other colleges and in elementary and secondary schools, and she’s immersed herself in the history of grading. (If you want to know who invented the multiple choice test, she’ll brief you on how Frederick J. Kelly did so at Emporia State University and how he later renounced his technique.)

But it was her own course this semester — called “Your Brain on the Internet” — that Davidson used to test her ideas. And she found that it inspired students to do more work, and more creative work than she sees in courses with traditional grading.

Her approach — first announced on her blog — works based on contracts and “crowdsourcing.” First she announced the standards — students had to do all of the work and attend class to earn an A. If they didn’t complete all the assignments, they could get a B or C or worse, based on how many they finished. Students signed a contract to agree to the terms. But students also determined if the assignments (in this case blog posts that were mini-essays on the week’s work) were in fact meeting standards. Each week, two students led a discussion in class on the week’s readings and ideas — and those students determined whether or not their fellow students had met the standards.

via insidehighered.com

I heard about this when they first posted about Davidson’s plans and I thought they were a good idea. Nothing revolutionary (though this author seems to think it is), but I like the approach that she took.

First, she establishes a general learning contract stating that students who fulfill all of the assignments get an A. Not submitting an assignment or not meeting the criteria, results in a lower grade (not set in stone).

Next, she assigned students into expert groups. Their groups are responsible for a topic, which is about a week long. The other students are then given assignments related to the content from that week (in this case, a blog posting). The expert group reads the blog posts and determines whether the student fulfilled the requirements or not.

I’ve done group grading before in which members assigned a percentage grade to their peers (I then averaged the grades and that’s what they got) as part of the total grade for the assignment. It was terrible. The biggest problem was the differences in groups. Some groups has much higher expectations than other groups. Even when performance was high, the grades were low. This was a serious point of contention among the students (as seen on end-of-course evaluations) and something I will never repeat.

Davidson’s approach does 2 things that make it much better: (1) they only judge whether the criteria were met or not (not giving a grade). A good rubric would make this a relatively easy task. (2) It focuses on frequent, smaller assignments rather than bigger projects.

I’m going to give this a try next semester, but I have to find the right class to do it with. I will teach a pedagogical English class that this might be perfect for (same class peer grading failed in last time). Smaller, bit-sized, weekly assignments graded by weekly “expert” groups.

A hole that I see in this is the way this compartmentalizes learning, though. Weekly topic groups don’t necessarily do well at synthesizing information from previous topics. These higher order assessments might be best implemented as midterm and final projects, larger assignments that require demonstration of knowledge gained throughout the semester.

In this case, there would be two parts, student-graded work and teacher-graded work. The percentage of these two would be around 80% and could be split in half (maybe), with attendance/participation rounding out the last 20%.

This is going to require a little more thought, but I like where it’s going. I want students to take more responsibility for their learning AND the learning experience their classmates have. I feel that being engaged as both producers and critics will motivate them to go beyond the simple requirements of the course and will provide the course with more diverse perspectives on teaching and learning language in Korea.

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